Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger has been employing media effects and strategies to create her own political, and social messages around consumerism, mass media, and feminism on billboards, buses, newspapers, buildings, and parks for the past four decades. Her instantly recognizable—and frequently appropriated—visual style of delivering highly charged, terse phrases in white Futura Bold font over red blocks has radiated its influence on other visual artists, graphic design, street culture, and skate fashion, and now fills the interior of this new public skate park. Kruger orchestrates her first live performance that expands on her critique of consumerism.

Barbara Kruger’s wrapped school bus can be seen driving around Manhattan and parked outside various Performa venues throughout the Biennial. Grounded in activism, feminism and community, Kruger’s signature text is reproduced on a large-scale vinyl format, covering the bus’s forty–foot-long shell.

The skatepark is located in Coleman Square Playground which lies on the border between Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

Created in partnership with NYC Parks and skate park designer Steve Rodriguez, Barbara Kruger will employ her signature effects and strategies to broadcast messages that engage issues of and ideas about power, desire, adoration, contempt, and capital at New York’s most popular skatepark underneath the Manhattan Bridge.